Archive for August, 2007

Posted on 08-16-2007 under games

The game is really getting polished these days. We (the Beta testers), are starting to give it a run on different computer configurations and seeing how it works. And now we’ve got a (low-res) gameplay video too! There’s also a neat little game launcher that you can use to setup simple options (like sound).

It looks like the final archive is gonna weigh around 12MB. Right now it has just one map, but there is an option to add more. And if our staff of graphics whizzes finds the spare time to do so, we’ll have more download-able scenarios in the future (yaay!).

It also feels a bit too complicated for first timers, and until you understand how to pilot the copter, it gets pretty frustrating. We’ve been asking Absar bhai to add a simpler “arcade” mode into the game. Poke him here to tell him to do so.

There’s a bit about the system requirements for the game here (scroll to the bottom). This is not final though, and it hasn’t been tested out on all types of systems, so you can expect this to change.

Thats all for now guys. Waiting for the day I get my hands on this one.

Posted on 08-14-2007 under general

Happy Independence Day everyone. Hard to believe its been sixty already.

Posted on 08-10-2007 under general, karachi

It rained very heavily yesterday. And what do you get when you cross Karachi with water? Venice sans all the glamor. Follow the links on the images for the full galleries.

Flooded street Driving in the water

As always, electricity’s out. Motors cant run, so water’s out. Sewerage is overflowing. Rain water mixed with sewerage water is threatening to contaminate underground water tanks. Weather’s humid and there’s the outbreak of Malaria everyone’s expecting.

Nothing new for Karachiites though.

Posted on 08-08-2007 under howto

Wanna keep up with the latest news on your mobile phone? Read on for the very simple way to do this and it doesn’t cost you a cent. Okay so you do have to send a message to a UK number when you register (only once) but thats all.

What you do is, you sign up for a free account on Twitter, then register your phone number. They’ll ask you to send a message to a number in the UK after which you should start receiving messages from Twitter.

The basic idea behind Twitter is that you can write something on the site, and all of your friends and followers will automatically receive your message. Once you’ve registered you’re phone on Twitter you can direct your messages to your phone.

Fine till here, but what about getting freshly baked news? Here’s where this little site called twitterfeed comes in. Twitterfeed allows you to set up any RSS feed to send notifications to Twitter. (If you’ve just crawled from under a rock, look up RSS first). So whatever news source you want, all you have to do is create a notification feed for it. More details about the process are on twitterfeed if you want to set up your own RSS feeds.

But you’re probably looking for the big news sites like BBC, CNN etc. Chances are, feeds have already been created on twitter for these sites. All you have to “follow” them on twitter, and you’ll start receiving their news feeds.

Here are some feeds to get you going:

Theres also stuff other than news, on twitter. For example, this is a good idea

If you find any more twitter links, please put them in the comments.

Be warned though. These sites update very often, and you’ll find yourself running out of message space on your phone very quickly. I have had more than 50 messages on my phone on some occasions. Especially if you were to turn your phone off for a while and then turn it back on again, you’ll get flooded. Do change your message ringtone to something less annoying because you’re going to hear it a lot. Also, deleting Twitter messages as you read them is a good tactic for controlling memory consumption. You can also limit your subscribed feeds to what you absolutely need. For example BBC South Asia generates much less traffic than Dawn News. And sometimes Dawn News repeats itself.

Also, these news reports will only be headlines. Sometimes there are a few words from the body of the news article and the rest is cut off. There is however a link at the end of the message, that you can follow, if your phone has GPRS, for the full story.

Thats it. Now you’ve got news on the go. And you don’t have to pay more than Rs.10 for the registration SMS. Enjoy.

Posted on 08-08-2007 under general

For you people living under a rock, its raining in Karachi!

God help us all.

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